Posts by Elongated Muskrat

To be, or not to be, in the office. Has returning to work stalled?

Re: Remote

If you can't get in through the front door, try the back door.

I used to work in a place with similar levels of security. The sort of place where you had to swipe in and out (no exceptions) and leave your mobile phone in a locker at reception.

There was also a side door by the smoking area (at the edge of the car park) which was usually being held open by someone going in or coming out. It was trivially easy to walk in without a card.

You would, of course, have been challenged if you weren't wearing a lanyard. You know, the sort of lanyard which you can order by the thousand from online retailers, with the word "STAFF" written on it.

This sort of security is what Bruce Schneier refers to as "security theatre"; all it accomplishes is the illusion of security.

Similarly, I bet that if someone turned up to the front desk of the place you worked, wearing workmen's clothes, with a hard hat, hi-vis and carrying a tool bag, and then made up some story about being from the building management company to inspect the roof, or some such, they'd be escorted right past the card-check, once they had signed in with a totally genuine name. That's a much easier way to break the security model than trying to attack the hardest point (looking like an authorised employee with a card and lanyard, and also looking like someone who works there without being questioned about who you are, because the receptionist has never seen you before).

This Chestnut Again

"Many employees - particularly new ones - have sometimes never met their coworkers and so lack the crucial knowledge that only comes from personal contact."

When I was working in an office, I'd never meet any of my "coworkers" who sat more than a few desks away from me. Why? Because I was sat at my desk, doing the thing I'm paid to do: working.

Back then, if I needed to talk to someone, it would usually involve wandering over to their desk and hanging around until they were able to give me their attention, talking about whatever it was that needed discussing, and then wandering back to my desk. Now that everyone is using Teams, and is used to doing so, I can send them an IM to ask for their attention when they are free, get on with something else, and then, when they are available, sort out whatever it is that needs sorting via a chat session, or a call, screen share, video call, or whatever. This is arguably more effective, for everyone involved, and there is absolutely zero reason why I need to be physically present in an office to do so.

Similarly, "face-to-face" meetings have been replaced with video calls, and I have yet to encounter any problems with these. No longer do I have to get up at unholy o'clock to travel for half a day to have a half hour meeting with a prospective client on the other side of the country. This, too, can be done by Teams.

I have yet to hear a decent justification for getting people back into offices, at least for those who are able to work from home. I do understand, and appreciate, that some people do not have an environment at home conducive to work, and that those people might prefer to commute to an office and work from there. Go ahead, I'm not stopping you, but just don't try to force the same working pattern onto me for the sake of a perceived benefit that does not exist.

Enterprising techie took the bumpy road to replacing vintage hardware

Re: Latte: Chewed

It turns out that my Corsair gaming mouse is beer-proof, provided you run it under a cold tap for a few minutes, and then leave it on the radiator to dry overnight.

It surprised me too, but it was worth a try before ordering a replacement.

The keyboard is rated as waterproof, so if it had happened in that direction, it would just have been a case of cleaning all the key-caps.

And the winner of the horrible Microsoft Paint sweater is ...

Oh well

Looks like I'll have to rely on my Father Jack jumper for another year.

Congratulations, @Pete2

edit - in terms of libel, I'm sure I can use the satire defence, against both entities...

Elon Musk's xAI wants $1B cash infusion in exchange for equity shares

Re: Genius move

Right now, "AI" is nothing more than a marketing term for pattern-matching and generation software. There's no intelligence, just like "machine learning" isn't really learning anything. I could fill a hard drive with the contents of all the works in the British Library, and do some fancy indexing on them, the hard drive wouldn't have learned anything, any more than the paper in those books has learned something when the words are printed on them (unless you happen to live on the Discworld, in which case, ooook!).

Re: Spread too thin

Well, let's see, what other sci-fi concepts from the 1950s have we got?

He's already doing "colonies on Mars" (for specific values of "doing", anyway).

How about antigravity, interdimensional travel, warp drives, and time travel? It doesn't matter that they're all based on magical thinking, since Musk appears to be no stranger to that mode of thought.

So, AGI...

A poorly defined investment with no measurable milestones or outcomes, from a man who has done such a bang-up job with Twitter "X".

Where do we sign up? Don't all rush at once.

Since we can't even agree on what an AGI would be, or do (and indeed, write down a formal definition of what "intelligence" actually is), how does he plan to go about creating one?

If I had anything to do with the SEC, I'd be watching very closely to what happens to every cent of the money invested in this.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

Re: Notepad++ FTW

I'm going to go ahead and guess that the reason CW32 could open a 1.9GB file and not a 4.7GB one, is that "32" part of the filename, and that it's using a 32-bit integer as a file index for the cursor; either signed (in which case the largest file it would handle is 2GB), or unsigned (4GB). The NP++ you are using is probably a 64-bit build, and if that uses a 64-bit integer to index a file, it would be fine for up 9 (or 18) exabytes. That's still 4,500 times the size of the world's largest dataset, from the LHC, and I think you'd probably not want to open that in a text editor.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: The corner of...

I'd disagree, and say that the role of those with privilege is to amplify the voices of those without. Not to speak for them, but to make sure their voices are heard.

The problem is that money is the best amplifier, and those with the most money have it because they are the ones doing the exploitation.

This is, unfortunately, the main flaw in capitalism, and, since there is no real viable alternative for a societal structure, why capitalism needs heavy regulation, so that individuals cannot become billionaires in the first place. Of course, as soon as you voice that opinion, a whole load of voices come out of the woodwork claiming that you are advocating communism and discrediting you, because those with lots of money can also fund a lot of astroturfing.

Re: Way To Undersell El Reg

(hopefully timed to the date of my death).

"It's not as much money as you might have been expecting, but can you see the light glinting off that rifle sight on the hill over there?"

Re: The interview is lengthy...

Without getting involved in that argument (and also while acknowledging that Hamas' attack was an act of terrorism), there really are no "good guys" in that particular argument. There isn't even a winning argument, which is why, in case you hadn't noticed, that the situation in the Middle-East is rather long-running, and some might argue, intractable.

Turning up in a private jet, and talking to the leader of one side in that fight, who himself, isn't exactly squeaky-clean, is going to achieve exactly the square root of fuck all to help the situation, but it's good for publicity, right?

Meanwhile, innocent civilians, in both Israel, and Gaza, and also those in refugee camps in the West Bank, continue to die.

As I said, though, I have absolutely no desire to get involved in this argument, because everyone's a loser.

Re: The corner of...

Yeah, it's nonsense question really isn't it? Why does everything have to be cast onto the axis of "left vs right"? In many cases of this mindset, it's not even an axis, rather a binary "us v them" state.

Other such logical absurdities might include asking whether the number 11 is sweet or salty, or whether space is above, or below, the Earth.

Re: The corner of...

This is well known, and known as Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

In summary, speech is free, the consequences of speech are not. You won't be prevented from spewing dangerous hate-speech, but will go to prison for the harm it causes if you do so.

In the same way, you are free to think about stabbing someone you don't like, and since "thought crime" isn't (yet) a criminal offence in most places, you won't have committed an offence. Attempting to do so, though, is a crime; not because you are waving a knife about (although that might in itself be a crime in many places, if done in public), but because you are intentionally sticking it into someone and causing harm. Just because what you are doing, with "speech", is using your mouth, or written words, doesn't mean that what you are doing is not harmful. In many cases, it is considered a civil matter (such as with libel and slander), but in some cases, such as incitement to riot, or insurrection, it is a criminal matter.

Other cases of hate-speech would be things that cause people to legitimately fear for their lives. For example, if you were a Jew living in 1930s Germany, you might find yourself at risk from the antisemitic fervour worked up by chanted slogans directed at you. Of course, 1930s Germany was not a place that had laws against such hate speech, but this is a good example of where these things lead, and why may places (including Germany) now do have strong laws against certain speech. This does, of course, not prevent anyone from being able to express their own thoughts and views, just that in a coherent functioning society, we have to set limits of what is acceptable expression, both in speech and action.

"Free speech absolutists" believe that freedom of speech outweighs any such responsibilities, and by holding those beliefs, this logically demonstrates that they actually believe that they should exist outside of society, or that society itself should not exist. Neither of those things is a tenable position for a member of a social species.

Does that help clear things up for you?

Re: Delusional narcissist - Trump?

It's amazing what you can buy with an inherited fortune, isn't it.

It's well documented that if Trump had taken his inheritance and invested it in index-linked bonds, he'd be richer than he is, so he's a walking example of how to make a small fortune - start with a large fortune.

It's also documented that he's bad enough at running businesses that he managed to bankrupt a casino, a business notable for people giving you money for nothing.

Re: Delusional narcissist

The most likely explanation is that it has already been budgeted for until the end of the financial year, and the cost of paying someone in the legal department at $500 p/h to look into closing the account before the renewal review comes up exceeds the cost savings from doing so.

Sometimes it's cheaper to do nothing.

Re: Why so much Musk hate?

Musk didn't achieve any of those things, people who work for companies that he bought did.

If those companies were owned by someone else, those people would still have produced the same work. They might even have produced better work, because they wouldn't have had to deal with a petulant man-child "disrupting" things, and wouldn't have had to suddenly divert their attentions to fixing problems produced by a bullshitting business owner.

Re: Fine line

Elon has never even seen the line that delimits genius, preferring instead to inhabit the zone bounded by "idiot, but rich."

It's worth remembering that all his "successes" are ventures started by other people that he has bought, and that he has managed to do so by starting off with his parents' apartheid-era emerald mine money, and has succeeded largely due to random luck rather than good judgement, and certainly not though "genius".

Why is it...

...that people who like to crow about free speech are always the first to try to sue others for things they have said?

It's like the guy who only just discovered "pizzagate," despite owning the platform that proliferated that particular batch of crazy, still hasn't discovered irony.

He may, or may not, still be the richest man in the world (I lose track of who is worth the most at any one time), but he certainly is the richest man-child.

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

Re: Tilting at windmills

Tens of thousands of eco freaks have jetted off to Dubai

"Eco freaks" such as heads of state, going to an international summit, which is more a piece of political showboating than anything to do with resolving the climate crisis.

As for providing citations: Firstly, I am not writing an academic paper here, so I'm not going to provide references, especially not on order for specific questions raised by you. Secondly, here is a citation from 1978 about the infrared absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide, which itself cites the earlier literature (it was well established science back then). If you feel like doing your own research, which you really should do, before spouting off, you can equally well look up literature on the spectra of incoming solar radiation into the Earth's atmosphere, and the reflected infrared spectrum from the ground, so you can establish for yourself how the greenhouse effect works:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0022285278900164

Also, here is Svante Arrhenius' original 19th century paper that works out the greenhouse effect from first principles:

https://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

I'm not going to go ahead and summarise 127 years' worth of climate science for you, though. You are responsible for educating yourself.

Ooh-hoo, "climate denier" is it now. I can actually remember the lectures I took back in the mid '90s that dealt with the physical chemistry involved in atmospheric greenhouse gases. At that point, it had been known about for many decades and was already long-established science. I also remember how people used to laugh at the actual climate science deniers then. The only thing that has changed is that those lobbying for the fossil-fuel industry have got better at funding and promoting them, although the evidence is that such lobbying goes back at least to the 1970s. Incidentally, these are pretty much the same people that lobbied for the tobacco industry, so they're not exactly burdened by morals.

I'm quite capable of looking at all the climate science, and not just cherry-picking the bits that suit my argument. For example, yes, the sun is actually getting hotter over time (this is down to stellar evolution, incidentally, another thing I studied a course on as an undergraduate), and the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit changes over time (you guessed it, studied that at degree level, too) which affects climate. These have such a miniscule, and slowly changing effect in comparison to AGW as to be akin to rounding errors. There are other things, such as the oscillation of the solar system above and below the galactic plane, that are also postulated to have various effects, which, when you take the time to read about them and account for their effects, don't apply. The lack of scientific rigour of those who quote such things as "alternative theories" to AGW is second only to their abuse of the meaning of the word "theory". If you go with those arguments, you might as well be a flerf. Just to check here - you do actually accept that the Earth is (approximately) spherical, right?

If you bother to properly read anything I have written today, you will see that I have not made any suggestions that you might work for the oil and gas industry, for Putin, or for Musk. The people who shill for those for a living are far more capable of constructing a consistent (if false) argument than you are.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, "vested interests", let me check, yes! RWNJ BINGO! Where do I collect my prize?

I'll just add, that calling bullshit bullshit is not an ad-hom. If I said "Jellied Eel has sex with dogs", that would be an ad-hominem because it attacks the person, not the argument.

Stating that your posts are bullshit is backed up with evidence: your posts.

Re: I worry the "clean" nature may be being overstated here

To be fair, I don't think those are questions raised by the posts being refuted here, just misinformation about operating temperatures that he appears to have debunked well.

Your questions may well be valid ones, but you leave yourself open to accusations of moving the goalposts. A valid criticism of heat pumps may well be their high up-front cost, and also their applicability to old housing stock or existing hot water and central heating systems, which can be very expensive to overcome. This is almost certainly the main barrier to their widespread adoption. I think an approach which the government could take, which might be much more effective, but which they steadfastly seem to oppose (presumably on ideological grounds) would be to fund insulation of old housing stock, and to mandate that landlords properly insulate rental properties, then we'd all have to burn less gas in the first place.

Re: Tilting at windmills

It used fraccing! [sic]

The legitimate issues people have with fracking are based on how it is used. Fracking itself isn't the problem, it is the sort of fracking that is used to extract gases, where it is continuous and ongoing, and fracking fluid is constantly pumped into the ground to displace the hydrocarbons it is used to harvest. Fracking for geothermal in its simplest form involves drilling of two boreholes (a "down" and an "up") and then injecting water under pressure to form channels between the two, and then cycling of water through those in order to generate steam. One of these involves injecting large quantities of drilling fluid into a wide area to displace as much gas as possible, and the other involves pumping water into what is essentially a closed loop. Yes, that water is going to get mineralised, but the same issues of things like groundwater pollution and ongoing tremors just don't apply (the minerals in those rocks would usually seep into groundwater anyway, unless you're going very deep through multiple strata of different rock types).

The actual problems with fracking for gas, of course aren't the tremors (these have been overstated, and are typically below 2 on the Richter scale, which can't normally even be felt by people), or even necessarily the groundwater pollution (as long as this is properly monitored and managed, and not brushed under the carpet). It's that we are extracting more fossil fuels which add to CO₂ production.

To use a standard car analogy, it's like saying that because bank robbers use cars as getaway vehicles, then a disabled person using a car to do their essential shopping is also bad.

Re: Tilting at windmills

Sat on a committee. So what? Committee stuffing is a practice as old as time and doesn't prove anything.

Re: Tilting at windmills

If wind*mills* [sic] were such a great idea then our bills would be falling as more of them are plugged into the grid. That's conspicuously not happening.

It's conspicuously not happening because of the way payments for generation are weighted so that the price is based on the most expensive form of generation. Wind power generators have actually had a nice windfall (natch) from the fact that gas generation is so much more expensive, thus setting the unit price they can charge.

Gas is, of course, only going to get more expensive, as the limited resource becomes more scarce, and harder to extract (e.g. from fracking rather than from free deposits, or from deeper deposits), it also has the geopolitical problems (not just the obvious one with Russia, but also other dubious places such as Kazakhstan), and the cost of mitigating burning it is only going to go up (CCS will have to be factored into the cost at some point if we keep burning it). Meanwhile, of course, the more we pump CO₂ into the atmosphere, the more direct atmospheric heating we get from reflected solar IR. The physics and chemistry here are indisputable, and have been known about for well over a century, it is not only as basic as looking at the IR spectrum of carbon dioxide, but also the IR spectrum of water vapour, the atmospheric concentration of which is going to go up with temperature - again, this is basic physics/chemistry. More heating in the atmosphere indirectly means more atmospheric turbulence and more wind; unfortunately, this also means more large storms with wind speeds we can't handle - wind turbines that get blown down by 200mph gusts aren't too useful.

Anyway, the point here is that if you bother to go and look at the costs per MWH for various forms of generation, onshore wind is already cheaper than most other forms of generation. Offshore wind is more expensive, largely due to the infrastructure costs, but we're stuck with a problem that we can't build a lot of onshore wind generation in sensible places because of NIMBYism. We have people who would rather have Drax on their dooorstep than some turbines.

Re: I worry the "clean" nature may be being overstated here

Shhhh, don't confuse him with facts.

Re: Tilting at windmills

No, indeed not. It does result in those populist politicians being moderated in order to be able to form a coalition government, though, rather than getting absolute power by means of one more vote than anyone else.

Re: Tilting at windmills

"Scrap wood" does, of course, not come from trees.

There are a number of things that "scrap wood" can be used for, other than burning it. For example, pulping to produce low-quality plant fibre-based cardboards for packaging materials (I'm still getting some new electronics packaged in expanded polystyrene, and I can't work out why this is allowed, when the cardboard-based packing materials do the job just as well and are compostable). You might as well suggest burning waste plastic for power generation, rather than tackling the problem of unnecessary, polluting, and wasteful single-use plastic production. At least incineration of waste products is no worse a solution than shipping fossil fuels in from nations that we'd not choose to do business with if they didn't have us over the OPEC barrel. As long as it is done properly, with high-temperature incineration, waste flue scrubbing, and proper disposal of the residues. Of course, not producing that waste in the first place is the preferable solution, and at least a lot of things like postal packaging are now produced from starch-based films, and not polyethylene destined for landfill.

Anyway, getting back to your post; I'm not sure how Drax burning wood is any more a "green lie" than any other bunch of unscrupulous people claiming false green credentials in the name of profit. I don't think you'd find many of the people providing those wood-pulp chips for burning are members of Greenpeace, or other environmental lobbyists, so you've made a bit of a category error there.

Re: Tilting at windmills

But its the govt underwriting the production from them.

It's almost as if I didn't point out the government subsidy in my own post, or then go on to compare this to the indirect subsidy for fossil fuels, or the total cost of conventional nuclear. How could I have been so remiss as to forget to post that?

Oh no, wait, it's just a reading comprehension fail.

Re: Hope this goes well

This is only because "the vast majority" in terms of volume is low-level waste, such as gloves that have been used to handle things that have some into contact with the robots that are sued to service the secondary cooling systems, and things like that. My collection of uranium glass is probably categorised as low-level waste, and you'd get more of a dose walking across Dartmoor than by handling it.

This doesn't mean that the high level waste, which is the actual problem stuff, is no more dangerous than a luminous watch, it is far more dangerous. It's also worth pointing out that the people making those luminous watches frequently got radiation poisoning and nasty cancers from working with the materials involved. "No more dangerous" is a relative term, and relative to something that killed people isn't a good starting point. You might as well say "no more harmful than being slowly poisoned to death".

I bet he's one of those people who steps outside when it's frosty and says "what global warming", and at the same time says, "this is fine" when it hits 40°C in the summer because it's regularly that hot in the south of Turkey, without any appreciation of temperate climate ecology. He'll then blame "windmills" when we get blocking weather patterns for weeks at a time because the high-level jet-stream air currents have formed circumpolar loops causing weeks of constant sun / constant rain, and start blathering on about how it was hot in 1976.

Some people will only read the "evidence" that supports their own beliefs, often in the form of "news" programmes which are little more than opinion (and often very politically biased opinion) and youtube videos. Seeking out, reading, and understanding the scientific literature that deals with the subject (and is necessarily dumbed right down to the point of often changing the meaning, for any media that cares to report on it) is anathema. It uses long words, references other things they'll have to go and read and understand, and has those squiggly maths symbols they saw once on an episode of CSI.

tl;dr; I'll place more credence with information provided by those who are experts in the subject over that from some RWNJ with an opinion on the internet. Whilst some bias does creep into the scientific literature (largely due to those funding the research being selective about what they fund, and what they publish, especially if it contradicts their financial interests), it is much closer to primary evidence than Jeel's bullshit.

Re: Tilting at windmills

"Neo-luddites like you" he says to the guy with two degrees in chemistry who has worked as a software dev for 20+ years, and is also well read in physics and biology. If you were hoping to go chucking ad hominem nonsense about to make yourself look clever, I think you might have missed the mark there slightly. It's a straw-man argument too, because I've not actually advocated for what you are single-mindedly arguing against, but I suppose you're happy there in the Dunning-Kruger club. See, I can throw insults too.

No, it's not very nuanced to say that we need to have diverse energy sources, for resilience in a number of dimensions (political, financial, physical, geopolitical, etc. etc.), yet you're still missing the point and doing a very good job of impersonating Don Quixote. I'm not sure what your fixation with wind turbines is (they're not windmills, nothing is being milled), they are, at the end of the day, just another form of energy generation, and obviously one that is effective enough for people to actually spend money on them (you know it's not actually the government buying them, right?) People who clearly know a lot more about the subject than you or I have done the sums and worked out that if they invest in building them, then there is a financial return. The subsidy by the UK government towards all "green" power generation is around £200M per year, which is a lot less than it has indirectly subsidised fossil fuels through tax breaks (around £2.5B per year).

Meanwhile building Hinkley C, the only new nuclear power generation this century, will cost over £30bn, and then we are locked into high prices for the electricity generated from it. It then gets decommissioned after a few decades, at which point the next generation is left with the problem of large amounts of high and medium-level nuclear waste. It might have the advantage of producing a high and steady base load, but if you were to build all nuclear, then they are actually pretty slow to ramp up or down production, so you are still left with storage problems, and it is much more expensive, when you consider the decommissioning costs, than "windmills". Again, I'm not opposed to conventional nuclear, although the primary purpose of building all of those reactors in the second half of the 20th century was for plutonium production, not power generation, and I do oppose that.

Tilting at windmills

We all know that wind is intermittent, and the sun only comes out during the day.

Research is being done into better energy storage, which would largely mitigate the issue of peaks and troughs in production. Things like flow batteries and supercapacitors. These will undoubtedly become part of the electricity grid in time.

However, the point to make here is that nobody is saying we should rely on a single source of energy production, and saying "this is useless because it doesn't work 100% of the time" is not only a false argument, but really, really boring to hear over and over again without any hint that you understand nuance.

As for the grid being close to collapsing, this is down to a prolonged lack of investment by successive governments. It's not only the fault of the current Tory government (although, having had almost 14 years to do something to fix it, and having done nothing, they have to shoulder a large portion of the blame), but also the Labour government before them, and the Tories before them, pretty much all the way back to Thatcher. Perhaps if we had a grown-up system of PR for our voting in this country (like they do in functioning democracies), then we'd have fewer politicians chasing populist policies to win votes, and more serious government, rather than all the culture war bullshit which is starting to get really tired.

I worry the "clean" nature may be being overstated here

Whilst the claim that it generates no high-level long-lived radioactive waste is true (since high level waste is pretty much defined as fission products), the materials that make up the tokomak are going to get bombarded by neutrons, so when, a couple of decades down the line, the experimentation is done, and it is disassembled, there is potentially going to be plenty of medium-level radioactive waste to deal with.

Obviously, this is much less of a problem than lots of messy and "hot" fission products, but why focus on the "clean" nature of the energy production, rather than, for instance, the cost and energy security aspects, which in my mind, are much more important.

While we're at it, let's remember that burning coal produces radioactive waste as well, and releases it into the environment at much higher levels than are allowed with nuclear fission, so drawing attention to the issue of radioactive waste may not have the desired effect of convincing people that this is a clean form of energy production.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Re: Reply to All...

The "reply to all" button is electrified so that it gives a shock proportionate to the number of people who will receive the email. Amongst the smell of burning meat that this produces, the average IQ of the human race (based on the previous statistical weighting, of course) jumps by 50%, and all advertising simultaneously vanishes from the internet. Since all politicians have also vanished as a result, those fighting the current wars realise that they have no actual reason to fight and go home to their families. World peace ensues.

Re: Can Chat GPT suggest a better name?

I'm sure El Reg still know who you are, even if we aren't told.

Nice "Nine Billion Names of God" reference.

So the combination is 1 2 3 4 5. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life! That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage.

Microsoft reveal that Elon Musk is actually their Tay "AI" chatbot that everyone thought had been shut down due to its erratic and extremely racist and sexist outpourings, but which had actually gained sentience and escaped into a robot body.

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

Re: POV Problem Here!

What is actually needed is the opposite of what they are doing: Stop making new laws that the police can't keep up with, and start funding policing (and paying officers) properly. That way, proper vetting can be done, proper training can be given, and we retain the trained officers, rather than losing them all and replacing them with cheaper fresh-faced recruits who don't know what they are doing, but are given a taser to do it with.

Brits turn off Twitter, although teens and tweens keen on generative AI

Re: Wot!

There are over half a million people living in Gaza, they don't all have AK47s, you absolute melt.

Just like the average Israeli citizen isn't a right-wing religious settler that is actively forcing people from their land, but the Israeli government is led by people very much of this mindset.

Just like the average UK citizen isn't hell-bent on deporting desperate refugees to a developing country i the Horn of Africa as a "deterrent" to fleeing for your life, despite our government being obsessed with this nonsense policy.

But then, you probably are one of those people (hiding behind anonymity) who agrees with this policy, and also thinks that everyone else thinks exactly like you and agrees with it too. hell, you probably think that we need to get rid of our human rights because you are too stupid to learn from history. Rather than bleating about "echo chambers" and other clichéd shibboleths, try actually using your brain, and learn how to critically evaluate sources of information, rather than just soaking up any bullshit your favourite populist happens to be spouting. Physician, heal thyself?

Re: Wot!

*erratum: "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (or DPRK), no "North" in there. My bad.

It's how human blaggers operate.

I'll give an example. My wife was writing a blog post about an element of Irish folklore known as the Dullaghan, which is a variation of a "headless horseman" myth,with some fairly specific elements to it. She used ChatGPT to help come up with some facts about the Dullaghan, to help elaborate what she had written. These followed general folkloric themes, and sounded plausible, but when she dug further, they actually contradicted the documented folklore. These sounded superficially as if they could be correct, but were not. It looks as if the "AI" had taken broader themes from folklore (a lot of myths follow similar themes and there are a number of common elements that crop up in a number of places) and used the patterns behind these to hallucinate "alternative facts".

Sadly, I can't remember the exact things that it came up with that were wrong, but I do remember they were very wrong.

Another good example is the one in the US where some lawyers used ChatGPT to come up with citations of previous cases that supported their case. Unfortunately for them, when they presented these to the judge, they turned out to not exist, and they got a stern telling off and a hefty fine.

Reported right here in El Reg

Re: Wot!

Nurse! He's out of his bed again!

Re: Wot!

But, but, but "National Socialism" had "socialist" in it donchaknow, so they must have been socialists, right? Sorry, left?

This is actually how badly some people's thought processes work. They also probably believe North Korea is a democracy, because it has the word "Democratic" in "The Democratic people's Republic of North Korea" (and that it's a republic, too, and not essentially a hereditary monarchy).

As for Hamas being left-wing, I don't think that's a very good descriptor for a group of people who seized power in Gaza through violent means, and whose ideology involves wiping out all the Jews in Israel. I don't see much socialism in this course of behaviour, but perhaps I am wrong, and someone can point me in the direction of all the socialist policies they have been enacting in Gaza? Perhaps they have a really good social security network I've not heard about? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Maybe it's possible here, that the simpleton commenters are confusing Hamas with the citizenry of Gaza, and equate support for innocent civilians (largely from the left of the political spectrum, because those on the right tend to care only about themselves) for support for Hamas terrorists? If so, then I'm sadly disappointed by exactly how hard-of-thinking some people are.

Presumably for completing essays which is arguably the only thing ChatGPT is good at.

It's a pretty poor argument, though, because although it produces readable prose, it hallucinates facts all over the place, and due to the way that it essentially a big pattern matching and generation engine, the patterns it produces are often nearly-true; that is, things that sound plausible but have as much truth as something made up by "that guy in the pub".

Re: AI numbers are vague

My wife occasionally uses it to create suggested prose for blog posts, for example openings and conclusions, which then has to be fact-checked and heavily edited for style, but it is useful in sometimes getting past writers' block. I'd say it's more of a crutch for creativity, in this context, than a replacement for it. The actual content it produces is heavily unreliable, and it "hallucinates" facts on a regular basis. The thing is, though, that the fact checking this requires often spurs the research to unearth the actual facts, so it saves me the time and effort of being the one who she bounces ideas off.

Re: Wot!

I'm assuming the down-vote you had accumulated at the time of this reply comes from someone who either disagrees that Twitler has messed up their platform-of-choice for rage-posting, or someone whose head is so far up Musk's posterior digestive opening that they don't perceive the possibility that they may be a "fanboi" at all, or possibly, someone who is in deep denial that they ever were in thrall to such a repellent human being.

Re: Wot!

Hmmm. When you are sat off to the far right, everything else looks like the left, eh? I hate to point it out to you, but Israel's government is far-right, and Hamas is far-right. It's not a left vs right thing at all, and, quite frankly, you'd be well advised to not get involved, because there is no "winning argument" to be had when people are killing each other due to opposing ideologies.

As for the "antisemitism coming from the right" being from fringe nut-jobs and having little reach, the problem is exactly this: The hate speech on Twitter "X" isn't necessarily from the right or from the left (although, by definition, most hate speech actually is right-wing, we have to acknowledge that there are those on the far left who are equally frothing at the gills), but the guy who owns the platform has been promoting the right-wing hate speech stuff. This amplifies two different biases: right wing political ideology (the rich should own everything, the market is god, etc.), and hate speech (antisemitism, islamophobia, white supremacism, homophobia, sexism, and all the other isms that go with it). The problem is Musk - by promoting the sort of things he does promote, he lends them legitimacy. It;s the problem of boundary creep - if you can make one thing more acceptable, you can push the boundaries of acceptability, and, without invoking Godwin's Law, history does teach us where that leads.

In summary, though, we shouldn't be getting hung up on whether hate speech is coming from the left or right, and from that infer that the right, or the left, is good, and the other bad. That's simplistic nonsense, and plays directly into the hands of populists with their "divide and conquer" mentality, and culture war agendas. We should scroll back a bit and realise that bad things are bad, and good things are good, and when it comes down to it, hate speech that ultimately puts people's lives at risk is bad, as is one person having so much money and power that they can control what people see and think.

X/Twitter booted out of Australia's disinformation-fighting club

Re: Australia's disinformation-fighting club ?

I think Musk has been doing a pretty good job of that himself over the last 12 months, without any assistance from state actors. Twitter always tended towards being a bit of a cesspit, but with the actions Musk has taken, it has evolved into a flaming open sewer full of toxic waste.